Democrat Terry McAuliffe is the very definition of a sleazy politician. If you doubt that, read this column I did back in 2001. It was about my discovery that Jim McGreevey had polished his resume to airbrush out his attendance at Catholic University for the first half of his college career.

I still don't know why McGreevey did that, by the way. I was impressed by the way he managed to get a Columbia University degree after attending that college for just three semesters. He should have been boasting about that.

But enough about McGreevey. Note in the column below how McAuliffe's people tried to deny he went to Catholic University with McGreevey even after it was obvious that was going to come out. This amounts to the crudest piece of political spin I've ever witnessed in my 38 years in the newspaper racket.

Also note this piece in which a number of Catholic U. alumni come out against McAuliffe.

Here's that column:

Those of you who read my recent interview with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jim McGreevey must have been quite impressed by his personal story. McGreevey graduated from St. Joseph’s High School in Metuchen and then sailed through Columbia, Georgetown Law School and grad school at Harvard.

I was impressed, too. But not as impressed as a reader who called me just after the story ran. This guy insisted he had gone to college with McGreevey — not at Columbia but at Catholic University in Washington. He had fond memories of McGreevey as an affable guy famous for his one-liners at campus parties.

This guy was clearly misinformed. I told him so as I scanned the transcript of the interview with McGreevey during which he talked about Columbia and how he had kept his nose to the grindstone during those years in New York.

To prove my point, I noted to the caller that profiles written in three newspapers in 1997 when McGreevey first ran for governor said the same thing about his college career. McGreevey had not objected to those stories.

So that was that. He went to Columbia for three years.

That convinced me. It didn’t convince this guy, however. So just to shut him up, I decided to call the Columbia registrar. James Edward McGreevey had indeed graduated from Columbia College in May 1978 with a bachelor of arts degree in political science, the registrar said.

But he hadn’t enrolled at Columbia until the year before. He was a transfer student.

A transfer? From where?

I called Catholic University. Sure enough, it turned out that actress Susan Sarandon is not the only famous resident of the Woodbridge area who went to Catholic U. A certain James Edward McGreevey enrolled there in August 1975, the registrar told me. Records showed he had left Catholic University in December 1976, the registrar said.

Another notable former Catholic U. student is the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Terry McAuliffe entered Catholic U. at the same time as McGreevey. The two knew each other and hung out at the same dorm, my guy told me.

So I called the DNC and asked if McAuliffe had any memories of college days with McGreevey. Soon a DNC employee named Leslie Sillaman got back to me with this quote:

“This is proof that not only do great minds think alike. They go to the same schools and go on to fight for a better America as leaders of the Democratic Party.”

Great quote. So Terry remembered those days back at Catholic U. with Jimmy?

Not exactly.

A half-hour later, Sillaman called back and told me that the quote applied not to when the two fighters for a better America were at Catholic University but from their time together at Georgetown Law School, which both later attended.

“After many calls to McGreevey’s office, it turns out they did go to Georgetown Law School but didn’t go to Catholic University together,” she said.

The following day, a Star-Ledger reporter interviewed McGreevey. The candidate admitted that he had indeed gone to Catholic University and that he had also gotten credits at Middlesex County College and Rutgers. Yesterday I called Sillaman back. She said it was the McGreevey campaign that had insisted the candidate hadn’t gone to Catholic University.

Then I talked to McGreevey himself. He cleared up the mystery about McAuliffe. “I knew him from both schools,” he said. “He was a nice guy, a hard worker.”

He also admitted that on occasion during his college years he took his nose off the grindstone long enough to go to campus parties. “I mean, I enjoyed life,” McGreevey said.

But at the same time he compiled an excellent grade point average, one good enough to permit him to transfer to Columbia, where he managed to accumulate 64 credits and graduated 17 months later. All in all, it was an impressive strategy for getting an Ivy League degree at minimum expense, one I intend to recommend to my daughters in a few years.

But I wondered why McGreevey had not just come right out and admitted it. “I just placed on my résumé the schools I graduated from,” he said.

As for the news articles saying he went straight from St. Joseph’s to Columbia, that was an assumption by the reporters, he said.

“I never said that,” he said.

Which he didn’t, as you can see from a close reading of my interview with McGreevey. But it sure sounded like it.

What Jim McGreevey said in the interview about his college years:

Q. And you did pretty good in school, because you went to Columbia University.

A. Graduated Columbia in 1978. Columbia was a different experience. I mean, it was - my mom, I think, had always wanted me to go to Princeton, bucolic, beautiful Princeton. Columbia was at the time - I mean the campus has improved so dramatically, just in terms of the physical structure, the layout. Columbia today, it's much more attractive campus. But it was very much New York City, the beat of the city, the pulse of the city.

I graduated in three years. My parents made an agreement with me that if I would pay $4,000 for four years. So, what I did is, I mean, basically loaded up on courses. At Columbia at the time you could take as many semester hours as possible by the semester. So, you paid not by the credit, but by the semester. One semester I think I took 21 credits and pushed even beyond that.

So, I graduated in three years so that I would be able to use the $4,000 remaining for my first year of law school at Georgetown. The McGreevey's are very much part of the middle class New Jersey experience. Money, bluntly, was an issue.

Q. And when you left this Catholic high school and went to Columbia, was that a big culture shock, being in an Ivy League college?

A. No. I think being at Columbia, particularly trying to graduate college in three years, there wasn't a lot of luxury of time. I mean, basically it was nose to the grindstone. My student activities were minimal. It was literally just almost studying on a consistent basis, figuring you were trying to crank it out on a three-year time frame so that you would have that $4,000 that you could allocate towards law school.